Hadn't really heard of SGI too much, going down the rabbit hole I thought this snippet from the Wikipedia page was especially interesting
"For eight consecutive years (1995–2002), all films nominated for an Academy Award for Distinguished Achievement in Visual Effects were created on Silicon Graphics computer systems"
Although it is stupid I can't stop searching Ebay for SGI machines. I have fond memories of running an Indy on my desktop and operating some Onyx machines. Now they are overpriced and it really doesn't make much sense to own one, apart from maybe the latest Origin 2 with R12000 but even this in the end would only catch dust. Even the best Buttonfly demos on the latest and greatest machines get a bit tired after a while.
Old home computers are still fun because there are hundreds or thousands of games and scene demos, and active enthusiast audiences for creative output.
SGI machines are extremely cool, but I don't quite grasp if collectors of old UNIX workstation use their machines regularly, and if so, what for.
Still, if I had the cash and desk space, I wouldn't mind a souped-up Indy that I could play around with for half an our once a year.
Once upon a time this stuff was so cheap, a little later than the (2003), because IRIX was discontinued and nobody knew what to do with all of the surplus. Something like a Tezro was always a little pricey and filled a permanent niche, but I got tons of Origin 300s and stuff like that without thinking much about it at the time. I've got the Router rack and several IR3/IR4 bricks.
LLMs actually makes retrocomputing a lot more "fun" because you can slop out things that would take way too long to do by hand for pure art and exploration.
> LLMs actually makes retrocomputing a lot more "fun" because you can slop out things that would take way too long to do by hand for pure art and exploration.
Doesn't that kind of completely miss the entire point of the hobby? Like attending an online language class in your spare time and then just using deepl in a separate tab?
Depends what you are trying to do and what is fun to you. Artisanal assembly on an 8-bitter can be therapeutic. I'm quite happy to let Claude rip through radare2 and ghidra de-compilations without understanding the intermediate steps.
There are plenty of great things to run on old SGI hardware that are still quite fun - Tranquility, Mekton, all the 3D apps you can find, flightsim, etc.
I used to dream of owning an O2, in no small part due to it being the host of Erwin from UserFriendly. And then I managed to score multiple out of the trash years later in college, funny how the world works. :)
I am old enough to have ben in business when SGI were a thing. The one thing I remember is that with the UMA arch, the memory was at the center of the design, not the CPU.
They definitely also had NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access): on multi-CPU systems, you had a variety of ways to specify where you wanted your data to live (stay close to one CPU, for example).
When I was a teenager my dad brought me to the 7th floor of the Daily News building in Philly. This floor was a kind of skunk labs - tasked with digitizing the paper for their new “website.”
This experience brought a couple of firsts:
My first time using the internet on a screaming fast, dedicated T1 line. Unbelievable to see Netscape load a site so quickly.
And: my first time seeing an SGI Indy. A row of them, in fact. This set off a fascination with operating systems outside System 7. I was so excited to get my hands on MkLinux, BeOS and later Rhapsody/OS X developer preview.
I remember watching a space shuttle launch live on the MBONE (multicast backbone) on one of the Indigo2 machines in the mech eng CAD lab. At the time the Australian internet uplink to the US terminated in the basement of that building. It took so long for home internet to catch up with that experience.
I've got a beefy Octane (4GB of RAM! dual R12000! MXE graphics!) but I honestly don't do much... At a time I used it as an X11 terminal but it's a bit too hot and loud even for that :)
"For eight consecutive years (1995–2002), all films nominated for an Academy Award for Distinguished Achievement in Visual Effects were created on Silicon Graphics computer systems"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Entertainment...
SGI machines are extremely cool, but I don't quite grasp if collectors of old UNIX workstation use their machines regularly, and if so, what for.
Still, if I had the cash and desk space, I wouldn't mind a souped-up Indy that I could play around with for half an our once a year.
LLMs actually makes retrocomputing a lot more "fun" because you can slop out things that would take way too long to do by hand for pure art and exploration.
Doesn't that kind of completely miss the entire point of the hobby? Like attending an online language class in your spare time and then just using deepl in a separate tab?
EDIT: Or was it “Sneakers” (1992)?
Not unlike Apple Silicon...
This experience brought a couple of firsts:
My first time using the internet on a screaming fast, dedicated T1 line. Unbelievable to see Netscape load a site so quickly.
And: my first time seeing an SGI Indy. A row of them, in fact. This set off a fascination with operating systems outside System 7. I was so excited to get my hands on MkLinux, BeOS and later Rhapsody/OS X developer preview.
I started checking after it said "these systems are six years old". Yeah, it's been a bit longer than that...